WEEKEND EDITION- Fusion Energy Breakthrough and Deadly Consequences of Bodybuilding

This is a compilation of some of the most compelling stories of the week.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Welcome to the Daily Dive Weekend edition. I'm Oscar Ramirez,
and every week I explore the top stories making waves
in the news and some that are just playing interesting.
I'll connect you with the journalists and the people who
know the story and bring you news without the noise
so you can make an informed decision. You can catch
a new episode of The Daily Dive every Monday through Friday.
That's ready when you wake up. On the weekend edition,

(00:27):
I'll be bringing you some of the best stories from
the week. This past week, we learned about a significant
breakthrough when it comes to fusion energy, something that could
one day provide us with unlimited clean power. We saw
researchers at the National Ignition Facility that we're able to
achieve what it's called ignition, getting more energy out of
a reaction than what they put in. The team fired

(00:48):
hundred and ninety two laser beams at a small fuel
pellet and it produced a small amount of net gain energy.
This is an important step in proof of concept, but
still a long way from being a commercially viable energy source.
For more on this fusion energy breakthrough, will speak to
Ifon Senior correspondent Advox this goal post here. It's called ignition,
and as you described, it's basically where the amount of

(01:10):
energy that they impart to start the reaction is less
than the energy that they actually get out, and that
means that now the reaction is actually worthwhile, that you
can get a net energy gain an increase here, and
then from there you could use that access energy potentially
to boil water to make steam to run a turbine
and thereby generate electricity. This is something, as you noted,

(01:31):
that scientists have been at for decades, since at least
the nineteen fifties, and they've been making incremental progress over
at this over time, but it's been frustrating. It's been slow,
and for fusion science in particular, it's been hard for
them to get consistent budgets to do this, and so
they've seen funding cuts in the past and that's also
slowed the research. But now finally they've gotten to this
point where after this incremental progress, they've been able to

(01:53):
cross this specifics finish line, which is an important step
forward because it's a proof of concept. It shows that
it is in fact possible to get more energy out
then in and if we were to keep out this
even further. Eventually, at some point in the future, you
could build a power plant around this. Now there's a
ton of stuff that goes into it. Let's talk about
the specific experiment where we did get that net energy gain,

(02:15):
and then we'll talk about a lot of the stuff
behind it, because it's also very important. So what they
did there was fire a hundred and ninety two laser
beams at this tiny fuel pellet, and they produced They
put in about two mega jewels of energy in, they
got about three mega jewels out. I think overall. They
said it is about one point five net gain that
they got. Described that to me, tell us what it means.

(02:36):
So gain is the factor of how much more out
than in you get. A gain of one is is
would be a break even. Basically you you have a
net zero impact and anything more than one is a
net increase. And so with this particular experiment, as you noted,
it reached a gain of one point five. You know,
this is an important proof of concept. It has never
been done anywhere before in a laboratory, and you know,

(02:57):
this is a huge step forward that you know previously,
the last big enough that they had out of myth
they were about seventy of the way there, so they
had a gain of zero point seven roughly, and so
being able to go at to reach one, and go
beyond one, that's a huge step forward. However, in order
to make this practical and useful, you need to get
a lot more energy out of the fusion reaction, because
you know, you have to actually run the generators, and

(03:19):
you also have to overcome the amount of energy you
need from the power grid to run all these lasers.
The specific way that they measured this, remember, is the
amount of laser energy hitting the fuel pellet. There's a
lot of energy that's lost in the process after the
lasers are actually first built up, charged up, and then
fired at this it's a very inefficient process right now,
and so you would need to generate drastically more energy

(03:40):
out of this process, maybe a gain of a lot
of hundred in order to break even in terms of
the energy that we use overall. And so there's a
much further goal post in order to make this much
more practical. Where only a tiny fraction of the way
there on that front, but from a technical perspective, you know,
this is still qualitatively a huge step forward, and that's
important to know. Right, As you mentioned, it's kind of

(04:02):
a proof of concept and we know now that it
can be done. But yeah, so much more needs to
be done to actually really clear the energy that we're
actually using for all of this. Tell me a little
bit about nuclear fusion in general, because we've been able
to do this. Uh, there's other terms that have been
thrown out there too, like nuclear fission, which is another
thing that we do that we already do. There's a

(04:24):
difference between them. The nuclear fusion, which is what we're
talking about right now, this is where there's not as
much nuclear waste attached to it. That's why they say
this is a potential for a big clean energy source. Right.
The nuclear energy that most people are familiar with that's
more commonly used is nuclear fission. That's where you take
big atoms like uranium and split them apart. The downside

(04:45):
of that, of course, is that those atoms, when they're
split apart, become nuclear waste and that can stay hazardous
for thousands of years, and so you need a place
to put them and also requires a lot of expensive
fuel to begin with. You need to generate and produce
in mind and extract all those heavy isotopes U is
sort of the opposite approach. Rather than taking big atoms
and splitting them apart, you're taking tiny atoms and smashing

(05:05):
them together. The outside of fusion is that the fuel
is derived from hydrogen. You can get this hydrogen these
isodose hydrogen from water from seawater, and so our planet
is covered with water. There's potentially a lot of fuel
that we could potentially very easily extract in order to
do these fusion reactions. And then after you run the reaction,
the net product is helium and gas that you know
is useful for a lot of other things as well,

(05:25):
and so there's very minimal waste in terms of nuclear
hazardous material that you would have to worry about for
thousands of years. And there's no greenhouse gases either. And
if you were to get this working, you know, on paper,
you know, you could get potentially gobs of baseload energy
basically energy that you can have on demand constantly, twenty
four hours a day, without producing any of the hazardous
stuff that we're all worried about. And so there's two ways,

(05:48):
two main approaches to doing this nuclear fusion. The one
that we're talking about right now, through the n i
F obviously is compressing this tiny pellet of fuel with
these powerful lasers. The other one is to heat up
temp too hotter than the Sun and use magnets to
contain some of that energy. This is also being worked
on in in another location through with another organization. Right,

(06:10):
so there's groups all over the world working on these
two main approaches and they're using flight variations on them.
So yeah, what NIF is doing is what's called inertial
confinement fusion. Basically, you take a point and you try
to smush it down into an even smaller point and
contain all those high energy atoms and um, you know,
protons in a very small space. With what the other approaches,

(06:31):
magnetic fusion, you basically use a giant metal donut and
you heat up the fuel so hot that it becomes
this new state of matter called plasma and it gets
too extremely hot temperatures hotter than the Sun. When they operate,
there's the hottest objects of the Solar system. And in
order to contain then object that hot, you know, you
can't even use a material, you can't use a substance.
You have to use powerful magnetic speel and so there

(06:53):
are some experiments now underway. There are tacomas this, so
that's what these devices are called here in the United States,
like at Princeton Laboratory, at M I T and a
few other places. And then there's a big experiment that's
being built right now in France which is going to
be the largest tacomac built and the most powerful one.
And so it uses magnets that are powerful enough to
lift aircraft carriers out of the water in order to
contain these kinds of forces. But it's still under construction

(07:16):
and it will be a few years before it gets operational.
This is exciting stuff. It is a breakthrough. I did
want to talk about the limitations and the next steps
for the future, right, because there's a lot that has
to be done to really make this viable for commercial
use and really start powering stuff life and the country
and in the world. So there's a lot of limitations.
So one with the system itself, right, the lasers are

(07:37):
based off of older technology. Those can be upgraded. That's
one of the main things that really needs to be done.
It seems like overall what they have now proves that
it works, we have to kind of go back to
scratch and rebuild the whole thing to make this work
for the future. That's right, you know, MISS is the
National Emission Facility. It's a it's a research laboratory. It's

(07:57):
not a power plant. It's not meant to produce energy.
It's a mainly meant to produce just to test this concept.
And so there's a lot of inefficiencies here that could
be corrected over time with you know, iterating and like
developed and engineering, but you know that have to be
done now at this point. We need more efficient lasers,
as you highlighted. You know, the lasers at this lab
are built on N level technology. We have much more

(08:19):
efficient and more powerful lasers that we could be using now.
The design of the fuel pellet, for instance, needs to
be optimized further. You know, they did received reach that
energy positive, but they didn't burn anywhere close to all
the fuel that was available, so there was a lot
that actually went to waste. And so we need to
better optimize the way that we use fuel. And this facility,
you know, is only able to produce a handful of
these laser shots in a given week. We need to

(08:39):
be able to produce something like ten to thirty per
second in order to generate a viable nuclear reactor around this,
and so certainly the stuff that they're doing now is new,
it's experimental, but it needs to be done at a
much larger, much faster scale, and that's the next challenge
going forward. Your fun senior correspondent at Box, thank you
very much for joining us. My pleasure, thanks for having

(09:00):
me finally for this week a look into the hyper
competitive world of bodybuilding and the extremes it takes to
get those outrageous physiques. There's hours and hours of training,
strict diets, and then there are the drugs, steroids and
other performance enhancing drugs. It's leaving athletes with irreparable damage
to their bodies, with some having heart problems, needing kidney transplants,

(09:24):
and worst case death. For more on how the extreme
sport of bodybuilding is pushing some to the edge, will
speak to Jen Abelson, investigative reporter at The Washington Post.
I knew very little about the bodybuilding world before I
joined this investigation, and it began out of a tip
from a colleague's father. Um was very involved in the

(09:44):
bodybuilding world, as though he had helped was involved in
making pumping iron back in the seventies and sort of
had gotten a tip after his father died about some
some really um you know, potentially devastating allegations about the world.
And so we sort of launched into this investigation, um
in two different areas, looking at um the sexual sexual
exploitation of women. In my area focused on looking at

(10:07):
the health risks to athletes, and so that is the
area that I sort of really dug into, and it
was really eye opening to really understand the intimate details
of what these athletes do in order to be prepared
to compete. Yeah, and that health aspect that obviously super interesting.
I mean, it gets to the point that some of
these athletes are dying because of the supplements, these steroids,

(10:29):
all the things that they're taking to prepare for competitions
and to get those physiques. You know, there's so many
You have a lot of examples in your piece on
this where there are signs that these athletes are going
through I'm experiencing cramping, I'm you know, i haven't had
a drink of water in hours. But still they push
forward and you know, with the help and encouragement of
their coaches, which is another whole angle to this they're

(10:52):
really doing a lot of damage to their bodies in
a lot of cases. Yeah, I think one of the
things that really struck us is just the way is
in which is really distinct from other professional sports, in
that at the when they are ready to compete, when
they're going to get on stage and be judged, it
is when they are at their weakest and most fragile
state um that they have been you know, depleting, dehydrating themselves.

(11:14):
They're incredibly lean. When we first started looking into this,
you know, there was a lot of focus on and
talk around just steroids, but it's so much more than
the steroids they're doing. There's this whole host in cocktail
of dangerous performance enhancing drugs. They're using fat burners that
are really meant as medication for horses. They're using um,
you know, underground sometimes unknown substances from labs online or labs,

(11:37):
and you know that they're finding things from China, and
it's um really left athletes in a fairly vulnerable position.
In addition to the steroids and the drugs and the supplements,
it's like the severe dieting and the diuretics and the
training hours of cardio a day Yeah, the diuretics is
an interesting part of it too, because you know, they're
taking this to remove water so their muscles look quote
unquote dry, more defined. And I mean that's one of

(12:00):
the biggest health problems that people get left with kidney
issues because you're just depleting your body of liquids. Yeah,
we've seen some, um, you know a number of athletes
over the year who have suffered severe kidney problems, have
had kidney transplants, sometimes multiple kidney transplants, and athletes have
died because of diuretic overdose as well. There was an
athlete in two thousand thirteen. Her name was Terry Harris.

(12:22):
She was had two days after competing in her first
professional bodybuilding show in Tampa, Florida. She went into cardiac
arrest um on a stair master and the corner you know,
said an electrolyte disturbance could not be ruled out. She
was having severe cramping before the show. Um. And there
was another athlete that we talked to, Jody angel Um,

(12:43):
who's still alive, but she's thirty one, she's a single mom.
She's but she's facing a lifetime of kidney issues and
her doctors have told her that she's going to need
a transplant. Talk to me a little bit about the
coaches and their involvement in all of this, because in
a lot of times they're pushing the athletes to obviously
pushed their bodies to the limit, but they're also giving
them the access to the the steroids and and other

(13:06):
things that they're giving them the dosage that they should
be taking. A lot of times they're not necessarily licensed
for that. You know, they're just coaches. Maybe they've done
it in the past for themselves, and so they're just
giving them a lot of advice and and really pushing
them to keep on track to a lot of these programs. Yeah,
I think what's really interesting is there's just a whole
various levels of accountability. I mean, at the end of
the day, you know, these these athletes are saying, you know,

(13:28):
I took the drugs. I personally am responsible for what
I put in my body. However, I will tell you
that I was relying on people who I thought were experts.
I was paying them for advice on what I need
to do to win, and what they're being told to
do by these coaches and by the judges who are
ultimately rewarding them is that they're being advised to take
you know, stacking on so many different steroids, stacking on
various performance enhancing drugs and diuretics and UM, fat burners

(13:52):
and and so, and we've seen both. You know, these
people often do not have any sort of formal training,
do not have medical licenses, their supply in their clients
in some cases with illegal stero steroids or bat burners,
they're they're giving them detailed plans of how much. We
saw Daniel Alexander, his coach, in the days before he
was UM he died of SARA induced cardiomyopathy, Like he

(14:13):
was being told to increase his doses of windstraw, which
is a powerful steroid, and and other other steroids that
he was taking and UM. It's just when you see this,
it's like a laundry list of drugs. These people are
being told to take UM and sometimes are being advised
not to seek medical care. Daniel Alexander is one of
those cases where he was concerned about seeking medical care

(14:34):
because he was worried that it was going to ruin
his physique, that he would end up getting filled and
pumped with fluid. Because like we've been talking about it's
all about coming and dry and to find and he
was worried he wouldn't be that way if he went
and sought medical care, and ultimately it was a it
was a fatal decision. He ended up dying that overnight.
He's such an interesting case. So he died at age thirty.
Daniel Alexander, And you know, throughout this investigation you were

(14:57):
able to access a lot of tech messages and emails
and for Daniel and a lot of other of these
athletes too, they have some similar cases. But Daniel texted
a friend who worked as a nurse practitioner and said,
five percent body fat right now. Lots of stems have
a very irregular heartbeat for over an hour, becoming painful,
still hard to breathe worry, like should I be worried?

(15:20):
And you know a lot of times you know you're
going contrary to what your own body is telling you.
Just reading that that sounds super worrisome. But as you mentioned,
he didn't want to go to the doctor, get liquids
and ruin what he had been preparing for. Yeah, I
think there's someone described them as contest blenders, which I
think is a good way to think about it that

(15:41):
they are so focused on winning, so focused on showing
up in a certain condition. They've spent a lot of time,
they spent a lot of money. These are very expensive
sports to compete in, the getting all of these drugs
and supplements, and they just are willing to do these
People talk about describing it sometimes as an addiction that
they're willing to do whatever writ takes in order to win.

(16:01):
It becomes an addiction to see how far they can
take their body to an extreme, and I think they
sometimes lose sight of like what is the you know,
a potentially life threatening emergency that's happening with their bodies. Now,
body building has been around for a long time, and
you know, the eighties and the nineties was a big
hey day for this, and you know, there was a

(16:22):
lot of steroid use, a lot of diuretics obviously back then.
To what has change or what is stayed the same
since that time, what we've been hearing from the athletes
and coaches and judges is that over time there has
really been this push to an extreme that the bodies.
And there's a great story today by my colleagues that
looks at the science behind what bodybuilders are doing your

(16:43):
their bodies and you just see them getting bigger and
more massive and trying to build be as lean as possible,
and so, you know, physiques. There was a story today
was talking about how Arnold would not be able to
win with his condition. Arnold Schwarzenegger would not have been
able to win, you know, the Olympia their bodybuilding competitions
with the physique he showed up in you know, back
decades ago and so it in people have described it

(17:07):
to me as like a freak show. And and coaches
when they brag about their athletes online. There was a coach,
Shelby Starns who um was very well known for working
with female athletes and especially the women the bodybuilding division,
which is like the largest, most extreme of the sport
that goes from bikini to bodybuilding, and he compliments his
athletes online as freak, freak show, freak zoid and that

(17:28):
that is the direction in which the sport in some
instances has gone. Yeah. He worked with Jody Angle, who
you mentioned earlier, who possibly facing kidney transplants and just
long term damage from the programs that she was set in.
What do we know or what have we heard from
the governing bodies for these competitions. You may mention in
the article how they don't really test a lot of

(17:49):
the athletes for some of these substances. What has their
reaction been to all of this? In the US, the
two largest body building federations, it's the National Physique Committee
run the amateur and the Inner i FBB PRO is
the the professional division, and they do not do any
kind of routine drug testing at all. There it's not

(18:10):
considered a drug tested league. There are certain shows, you know,
certain show promoters may advertise and and promote individual quote
unquote natural shows where they do test, sometimes by polygraph
or sometimes by urine, but by far and away that
that is not the regular at these shows that they
are not subjected to any of it. So they have
essentially opted out of of of knowing what their athletes

(18:33):
are doing in order to show up on stage. UM
there's another major body building federation UM that's based in
Spain that they say that they do drug testing. However,
they were recently sanctioned by the World Anti Doping Agency
for failing to UM, you know, spend enough money on
testing and for failing to do effective testing. So and

(18:54):
I think there's other places around the world where it's
it's sort of the people are looking the other way
and kind of turning a blind eye. And so it is.
It is as as Luke Sando's mother, um lu Sando
is an athlete from the United Kingdom who died thirty one,
and she said to us, you know, she said, it's
an absolute free for all. There's just real destruction and
devastation and destroyed lives. And I think describing as an

(19:16):
absolute free fall for all is something I've heard from
other people as well. Jen Abelson, investigative reporter at The
Washington Post, thank you very much for joining us. Thank
you so much for having me. That's it for this weekend.
Be sure to check out The Daily Dive every Monday
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(19:36):
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This episode of The Daily Dive has been engineered by
Tony Sarentina. I'm Oscar Ramirez in Los Angeles and this
was your Daily Dive weekend edition